Do people across the world want to remember positive ingroup histories?

Abstract

A key assumption in collective memory research is that group members are particularly inclined to preserve history that reinforces the ingroup’s positive identity. Yet, this assumption lacks solid empirical support, as research has rarely measured the identity-protective potential of historical events considered important to remember. Theoretically, this support is essential because group members may engage with history for reasons other than benefiting their ingroup. We complement existing literature by systematically testing the identity-protective tenet using a bottom-up approach. After sampling a broad set of historical events, we assessed the identity-relevant characteristics attributed to the events and examined how these characteristics relate to group members’ willingness to remember them. Across a preregistered study conducted in seven different national contexts (N = 2,045 participants; N = 7,665 ratings of 360 unique events), we found that events viewed as involving the ingroup in an agentic manner were considered important to remember in most countries. At the same time, we observed notable cross-national variation in the willingness to preserve events in which the ingroup caused positive consequences, behaved morally, or experienced threats, with a stronger tendency to remember ingroup-favoring history in less individualistic or less globally connected countries. We discuss how these findings bridge a crucial empirical gap by demonstrating that identity protection likely represents only one component of collective remembrance, whose importance appears to vary considerably across countries.